Soloing

Soloing, what's the big deal with it anyways?

Why does everything have to be soloable? Why can't things be group-mandatory?

I'm eagerly awaiting the release of Champions Online, and it's promise of free-form character creation, and while perusing the CO forums I come across a poster who seemingly wants to be able to solo everything in the game.

Well, not quite, but that's how he first comes across. He and his wife were enjoying soloing through the Hollows in City of Heroes, when at the end of the zone there's the 8 player Trial mission. Apparently this caused his wife such trauma that she has sworn off playing the game at all ever again.

Now I can understand the desire to play through the content you want to play through with people you want to play through it with, but going so far as to shun a whole game based solely off the fact there's one mission that you've come across that you don't enjoy seems a little excessive. In fact it seems like something an immature-gamer would do. (Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the wife in some 6 year old, but rather she's having an extreme reaction to a relatively small issue in MMOs, which is you can't always do what you want when you want, and some times at all.)

Now what his has really brought up is how much soloable content should there be in an MMO? And what more should content scale in any way?

City of Heroes was the king of scaling content. Everything short of open-spawns would scale based on the number of players you had in your group at the time when the mission started. Great for challenging things based on whoever you have around at the time, but it somewhat takes the punch out of "group required" content since everything can give that same feeling of fighting larger harder opponents by just bringing more friends.

World of Warcraft on the other hand has distinct tiers of content. You have the solo-quests, the group quests, the 5 person dungeons, the 10 man raids, and the 25 man raids. You can take 24 friends along with your questing, but it's beyond overkill (and offers logistical problems like quests that can't be completed in raids, and therefore you have 5 groups of 5 not one group of 25 people.) What that typically ends up with in game is people solo to quest, except when needed, and group for other things. If you can't group, you can't do the higher levels of content.

Hopefully CO's solution to this, which is to have enemies who call in reinforcements if they're outnumberd, will allow solo content to scale to groups, yet at the same time still allow group-content to pop in it's own unique way. We'll see how things are soon enough.

-LaFollet